This invention relates generally to a soldering apparatus. More particularly, the present invention is directed to an apparatus for coating terminal leads of electrical components such as integrated circuits (IC) with solder.
As well known, before being mounted on printed circuit boards, electrical components to be joined to the circuits of the printed circuit boards are desired to be pretreated for coating their terminal leads with solder and for improving solerability thereof. Such a pretreatment has thus so far been effected by a method including manually mounting the electrical components one by one on a holder plate, and manually loading the electrical components-carrying holder plate on a carrier of an automatic soldering apparatus. After soldering, the holder plate is unloaded and the electrical components with their terminal leads coated with solder are removed manually therefrom. Thus, the conventional method is time consuming and requires many hands.